With Few Clues, Afghan Pathologists Try to Put Names to Torture Victims

KABUL, Afghanistan — When the mortal remains of a man named Nawab were brought to what is, in effect, the Kabul C.S.I. on April 30, they all fit easily into a wooden crate small enough to carry under one arm.

Afghan pathologists at the Directorate of Forensic Medical Services do not even have powerful microscopes, let alone sophisticated DNA testing, so identifying those remains was more a session of 20 Questions with family members than a scientific investigation.

Mr. Nawab was one of 17 people who, according to an investigation by the Afghan Defense Ministry, as well as interviews with many of their family members, were last seen being picked up by an American Special Forces A Team in the Nerkh district in Wardak Province. He was reported detained on Jan. 30.

The Afghan authorities have now determined that 10 of those men are dead, with the others unaccounted for as much as six months after their disappearances.

In the crate there were chunks of bone that appeared to have been blown to bits, scorched scraps of flesh, a jawbone with 11 teeth and, most important, pieces of clothing, including part of a shirt with elaborate embroidery. The wear on the teeth indicated a man age 30 or younger, which Mr. Nawab was. But if family members were going to be able to get and bury the remains of Mr. Nawab, a driver from Ibrahim Kheil village, they would have to describe the embroidery and the type of fabric.

It came down to the victim’s mother, who remembered the embroidery because she had done it herself, allowing the family to describe a perfect match with the clothing scraps. Dr. Najibullah said he was satisfied, made the identification and returned Mr. Nawab’s remains to his family. (Like many Afghans, Mr. Nawab used and Dr. Najibullah uses only one name.)

The Nerkh disappearances led to a severe strain in relations between the Afghan government and the United States military, with President Hamid Karzai at one point ordering all Special Operations forces out of Wardak Province.

Afghan investigators have accused a man named Zakaria Kandahari, whom they identify as an Afghan-American man working with the American commando team, of detaining, torturing and murdering many of the missing men. They also accuse the American team of at the very least being aware of his actions, if not complicit in them.

The American military said it had repeatedly investigated the disappearances in Nerkh and had found no wrongdoing by any American military personnel. It also insists that Mr. Kandahari is not an American citizen, and that even though he had been employed by the military as an interpreter, he was no longer working for Americans at the time a videotape showed him engaging in at least one case of torture.

“The video surfaced in January, and we started looking into it,” a United States military official said. “Afghans asked us about it; we started digging into this guy’s background.”

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Seventeen people are reported missing in the Nerkh district.CreditThe New York Times

In the background of what has publicly played out as a politically delicate and contested criminal case, family members and Afghan forensic investigators have struggled to pin down details of the disappearances and killings.

Human rights investigators have been reluctant to list victims like Mr. Nawab as positively identified in the absence of DNA testing. The only such testing available in Afghanistan is at the American military base at Bagram.

Although the American military has said it investigated the disappearances thoroughly, three times, the results of those inquiries have not been made public, and officials have not been willing to discuss the findings publicly in any detail. No DNA tests were performed by the American authorities on the remains that were found, according to the Afghan authorities.

Dr. Najibullah and a second forensic pathologist who worked on these cases, Gul Rahman, both said they had never been visited by American military investigators, although at least three bodies identified as belonging to the Nerkh missing and found close to the former Special Forces base have been brought to their Kabul facility since April 7. (The other seven dead had been found relatively soon after their disappearances and were easily identified, so were never brought to the forensic center.)

In one case, the video evidence described by Afghan officials directly made the link between a body and the accused man: They say it shows Mr. Kandahari torturing a Nerkh resident identifiable as Sayid Mohammad.

Mr. Mohammad’s body was found on May 21, close to the Nerkh base used by the Special Forces at the time of his disappearance on Nov. 21. Mr. Mohammad’s remains were relatively easy to identify because his body had been sealed in a military-style black body bag and had only partly decomposed, according to Dr. Rahman. His feet had been cut off, but otherwise the body was intact.

A third set of remains found near the Nerkh base has been identified by the pathologists as belonging to Mohammad Qasim, a farmer from Karim Dad village, who was detained by a Special Forces team while attending a wedding ceremony Nov. 6, according to his brother, Shaheedullah, who also attended it. He said the commando team had included both Americans and Afghans, among them Mr. Kandahari.

But when family members went to the Special Forces base the next day, “they didn’t even admit they had detained him,” Mr. Shaheedullah said.

Mr. Qasim’s badly decomposed remains, discovered April 7 within a few hundred yards of the base, were brought to the forensics center in a heavy black plastic bag. Dr. Rahman, who examined them, said many of the bones had been fractured, which he said could have been from torture or from an explosion.

With the remains, which were unearthed in a trash pit, there was a handkerchief with flowers embroidered on it, he said.

Mr. Shaheedullah said family members had been able to describe the flowers in detail, and the pathologists ruled that the remains belonged to his brother.

“We are sure these bodies belong to these specific families,” Dr. Rahman said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: With Few Clues to Go On, Afghan Pathologists Try to Put Names to Torture Victims. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe